The Mama Sutra

by Anne Cushman

  When I open my eyes to it, the trip—just as it is—is bursting with miracles. The crunch of hot buttered toast. The glowing red ball of the sun as it drops low on the horizon over the runway I see through the window by the ice machine, and the plane taking off steeply in front of it. The laughter of my boy as he lies on the bed next to me, reading Syren, a book in the Septimus Heap series.

  And the glorious fact that—other than a couple of calls to the airline to cancel our tickets—I don’t make a single plan for seventy-two hours.

  * * *

  —

  After three nights in the hotel, Forest is well enough to board a plane home, though he’s still coughing and weak. We pack up our backpacks again and head out. Before I close the door, I turn and bow to the hotel room, as if walking out of a temple.

  It hasn’t been the trip I had planned. But it has been real—and I have been there for most of it. And that, in itself, is cause for a small celebration.

  SUTRA 14

  The Terrain in Spain

  • • • • •

  THE SUMMER THAT Forest turns eleven, I swap houses for a month with an old friend who lives in Spain, a former yoga buddy I haven’t seen or even spoken to in over two decades.

  Shawn and I were both in our twenties when we first met. She was a slender, intense yogini from Vermont with a long brown ponytail and Birkenstocks. We were both in a teacher-training program at the Iyengar Yoga Institute in San Francisco. We had drilled side by side on green sticky mats in our eighties-style tights and leotards, parsing the muscular grammar of Downward Dog and Revolved Triangle. We crayoned nerves and organs in our anatomy coloring books and identified—blindfolded—the disassembled vertebrae of a plastic skeleton. After class we’d go out to lunch at a militantly vegetarian restaurant whose hand-lettered menu seemed designed to shame us into veganism. (Eggs, for example, were on the menu as “chicken menstruations.”) We visited each other’s homes for yoga dates, during which we balanced side by side on our heads while discussing our once and future boyfriends.

  But then she fell in love with one of our fellow yogis, a handsome, serious Catalan man on sabbatical from his engineering job in Germany. They married and moved to Barcelona. Shortly after their first baby was born, she wrote me a letter on a flimsy blue aerogram—she sounded lonely, and I meant to write back right away. But I got distracted by a few other things—some long treks through India, a couple of books, a marriage, a child, a divorce.

  Now, suddenly more than twenty years have slipped by, and I want to take my son to study Spanish in Spain. Forest’s been taking lessons off and on since he was in kindergarten, when I’d enrolled him in an after-school class called Hola Kids, and he’s currently studying Spanish in fifth grade. We’ve made brief trips to Mexico and Costa Rica, but I want him to have the chance to immerse, especially since our planned homestay in Guatemala the previous year never got past the Dallas—Fort Worth airport.

  My Google search turns up Shawn teaching prenatal yoga and working as a doula in Sitges, a beach town just south of Barcelona. She answers my email right away: “I still have a photo of you in Downward Dog hanging in my painting studio!” I tour her Facebook page, where she looks exactly the same as I remembered her, until I realize I am viewing a photo of her daughter. I have a warm but disorienting Skype conversation with a European woman with a chic blonde haircut instead of a brown ponytail, who answers to Shawn’s name but keeps breaking off to chat in Spanish and Catalan with her two teenagers.

  In the decades since we’d last spoken, Shawn and I have each built a thriving life—and along the way, accumulated the usual list of roads-not-taken. I envy her established twenty-year marriage. She envies my fresh new romance with a qigong teacher. I pine for her bicultural, trilingual sophistication. She pines for my local community of dharma yoga friends. She tells me about the first yoga class she ever taught in Spanish—which she hadn’t started learning until after her wedding—in which she had instructed a group of pregnant women to “sit on their testicles” (inadvertently confusing the Spanish word for “cushions,” cojines, with cojones). I tell her about the time I led a silent yoga and meditation retreat with my screaming four-month-old son in a frontpack, my milk letting down and soaking my camisole as I guided the retreatants into savasana.

  A flurry of emails later, she is sitting at my kitchen table in California—along with her husband, her son, her daughter, and her daughter’s best friend—handing me the keys to her house, her gate, her car, and her mailbox; instructing me on how to operate her Persian blinds and put her cat’s food bowl in a moat of water so the ants won’t infest it.

  And then I am doing a seated twist on her yoga mat on her terracotta patio, next to a lemon tree and a garden bed of basil and tomatoes, looking over a valley of rooftops and orange-blossomed trees at the Mediterranean Sea—while in the lawn chairs next to me Forest reads Pendragon and Teja plays a flamenco riff on Shawn’s husband’s guitar.

  * * *

  —

  Travel writer Bill Bryson once said that the great gift of travel is that it puts you in situations where you can’t take anything for granted. I’ve found that, like meditation, it cultivates a kind of beginner’s mind in which each experience is fresh.

  A house swap, in particular, invites the tantalizing fantasy that you are truly leaving behind not just your own familiar routine but your own familiar and slightly annoying self—swapping it out for a new, improved, more fascinating self, with better outfits and a better shot at enlightenment. Dropped into the middle of another woman’s life—sleeping in her bed with her mosquito coil humming, riding her bicycle to the beach while wearing her (only slightly too small) flip-flops, sautéing zucchini from her garden in her kitchen and serving it up in her beautiful Spanish crockery—I feel, at first, as if I’ve been reincarnated. Yes, I’d learned some great lessons from that Guatemala trip that never happened. But I’m sure I’ll have even better insights now that the teachings come with a side of paella.

  Our first evening in Sitges, a friend of Shawn’s invites me and Forest to a fiesta de espuma—foam festival—in a nearby village. It’s a giant public bubble bath, in which a cannon mounted on top of a truck fires a stream of soapy foam into a plaza next to a seventeenth-century church, while a salsa band plays with no shirts on. Children in bathing suits and goggles, wrinkled abuelitas hand in hand with their grandkids, and papas with toddlers seated on their shoulders all frolic in neck-deep bubbles to a Latin beat. As Forest dances through the crowd with a corona of bubbles, shaking his frothy hips and waving his arms, I think happily, Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in America anymore.

  The next day, Forest, Teja, and I take the train into Barcelona for a bicycle tour through fifteenth-century streets jammed with honking, fuming twenty-first-century traffic. We pedal through the medieval courtyard of the Plaça del Rei, where Ferdinand and Isabella greeted Christopher Columbus on his return from the New World. We cruise past the sandcastle-like splendor of La Sagrada Familia, the still-unfinished masterwork cathedral of the architect Antoni Gaudí, who spent his final years living as a pauper in its basement. We pause for snack bars and water at a series of memorials commemorating religious and political martyrs who over the centuries had been shot, or burned at the stake, or beheaded; had boiling oil poured upon them, or been rolled through the streets in barrels full of broken glass.

  But it isn’t just the touristy photo ops that brush the cobwebs of familiarity from my eyes. In a foreign country where I don’t speak the language, ordinary life—buying groceries, doing laundry, driving Forest to and from his sailing camp in Shawn’s old VW van—is a constant mystery. With the adaptability of youth, Forest learns to sail with the instructions all in Spanish from his slender Argentinian teacher. (“Make sure you understand the words for ‘right,’ ‘left,’ and ‘watch out!’ ” I tell him as I drop him off.) But I blunder through my days, bleating the primal phrases o
f need and want from my introductory Spanish CDs—“Quiero…necessito…tienes?”—and misunderstanding the answers. A freeway sign flashes a warning—Peligroso!—which I fortunately know means “danger.” But I can’t understand the rest of the warning, which in any case has already disappeared behind me.

  I also can’t understand: Why is the old woman at the roadside fruit stand so irritated that I’d picked up the melon and set it on the weighing scale? Why are the carts in the Supermarque chain-locked together, and how do I get them apart? For that one, I send Forest to inquire in Spanish of the white-coated man at the meat counter—who is standing next to an entire pig, skinned and gutted, dangling by its hind ankles from an overhead hook. (Vegetarianism, we have learned, is a rare phenomenon in Spain. When we request our salads sin carne—without meat—they come with ham instead.) In the United States, meat comes tidily packaged in plastic, its animal origins coyly disguised. In Spain, it rolls its eyes and stares right at us: Hi, I’m Wilbur, and I’ll be your tapas for this evening…

  Alas, it quickly becomes clear that I have not been reborn into this new reality as an entirely new person—say, for example, a spacious and nonjudgmental person who doesn’t get annoyed when her partner plays classical guitar till after midnight and sleeps in till ten, and then drinks strong Spanish coffee from a two-liter measuring cup, even though she has repeatedly told him that the best way to get over jet lag is to get up early and do yoga and meditate with her, and even though she is clearly so right about that! Unfortunately, I have packed my mind along with me—as opinionated and prolific as always. Most mornings, Teja and Forest sleep in. I stand on my head on the patio and fume, wondering why no one wants to join me.

  A week into our trip, after dropping Forest off at sailing camp, I head home to practice yoga on Shawn’s patio. The breeze smells of salt water and orange blossoms. A garbage truck groans up the street, with a sound like a very large animal in labor. The knots in my spine unravel in a gentle twist. And as I drop into the pause at the bottom of a long exhalation, I think, Now I’m finally here.

  But what do I mean by “here”? Shawn’s house is eerily similar to my own: peach-colored walls, a closet full of yoga props, a stack of zafus and zabutons piled in the corner of the living room. And deep in the heart of my practice, I could be anywhere in the world. Folding into a forward bend, I meet with the same familiar body I greet in California—though admittedly more laden with pan al tomate. Seated in meditation, I meet with the same familiar mind. Sure, the content of my tumbling thoughts is different: What metro stop will get me to the Joan Miró museum on the peak of Montjuïc? Is it really okay for Forest to eat chocolate croissants for breakfast, and if so, can I have a bite? But my mind’s basic structure is the same: the cascade of seeing and hearing and smelling and tasting; the flickering slideshow of planning and judging; the undertow of anxiety laced with longing. Have I really traveled six thousand miles just to do this?

  It’s one of the basic teachings of Buddha dharma, I reflect, as I hoist my pelvis onto a foam yoga block for a supported inversion: the illusion of solid self that I cling to so tenaciously is composed of a limited number of ever-shuffling components. Wherever I go, my experience is created from the same basic elements: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, thinking. From the point of view of a yogi, Spain and America are just abstract concepts. There is no coming and no going; you’re always right here, right now. From that perspective, we might as well have stayed home—or gotten stranded in yet another airport hotel for a week.

  And yet…A pill bug crawls toward my head; when I blow on it, it curls into a ball and tumbles away. A firecracker bangs exuberantly somewhere down the street. My sacrum releases with a pop as I drop my feet to the floor. A high-speed train roars by at the bottom of the hill. My practice invites me into a living intimacy with this specific unfolding moment—a forty-something woman upside down on a patio, with a fat gray cat leaning against her shoulders, wanting his belly rubbed. I’m glad that, this time, our travel plans worked out.

  Again and again, I reflect, my practice of yoga and meditation helps me navigate this dance between the universal and the personal, the absolute and the relative. It teaches me to honor my own quirky, specific human body and mind and story while at the same time seeing their ever-changing, impermanent nature, inseparable from the interconnected web of pill bugs and chocolate, garbage trucks and sangria. And it reminds me that I have the opportunity to be reborn in each new moment, wherever I might be on the planet.

  My practice reminds me that in travel, as in yoga, the point is not just to get from one peak experience to the next—the poses and destinations are part of an ongoing vinyasa, or flow. As Forest, Teja, and I take the metro through Barcelona to a flamenco guitar concert at the Palau de la Música Catalana, I remind Forest that our day’s adventure is not just the hour and a half we will sit in the concert hall, a stained-glass ceiling arcing above us, listening to Pedro Javier González play Recuerdos de Alhambra. The adventure is also our sweaty confusion as we puzzle over the metro maps by the train tracks; and it’s our rescue by a young architecture student named Maria, who listens patiently to our halting Spanish and leads us through the maze of the station to the right metro line. If we can’t be present for Maria and the metro, the chances are that we won’t be fully there for the concert either.

  My daily meditations help me stay centered as we take a cable car up a jagged mountain to the eighth-century monastery Santa Maria de Montserrat, which now attracts a million tourists a year. “That sounds like a monk’s worst nightmare,” I say to Teja. But outside the bar by the monastery museum we spot a group of portly, black-robed monks drinking red wine and passing around trays of hors d’oeuvres. Forest takes off his sunhat and sets it on a wall to pose for a photo with a statue of a saint; by the time we have snapped a few shots, the hat has been stolen by one of our fellow pilgrims. I suggest to Forest that perhaps in a few hundred years, Spirit Rock, the Buddhist retreat center where I teach in California, might look like this: a cable car to the hill above the meditation hall, with a café and a bar on top, and a viewing platform where tourists can watch through binoculars as the vipassana students do walking meditation in the courtyard.

  And my practice reminds me to stay relaxed as we celebrate Forest’s eleventh birthday with a few of his new Spanish friends and a chocolate cream cake with Felicidades written in white icing. Forest’s dad flies in in time for the party, en route to a business trip in Germany, with his beautiful new girlfriend accompanying him in high heels; I am suddenly conscious that my bare feet badly need a pedicure. The kids play a Barcelona version of Monopoly and argue about the rules in Spanish, while the grown-ups drink sparkling water and make conversation that is not as awkward as I’d feared.

  The trip reminds me to be free-spirited in my yoga and meditation practice—to enter it, every time, with the spirit of adventure, open to the surprises that might unfurl in even the most familiar posture, the most ordinary breath. It reminds me to celebrate my body and my life with the unself-conscious exuberance of the women on the crowded Sitges beach, where virtually everyone—grandmother or teenager, slender or billowing flesh—frolics in the waves wearing the kind of tiny bikini that, back in California, you have to be a twenty-something supermodel to flaunt.

  At the end of my month in Spain, I fly back home to my own collection of yoga mats and meditation cushions—and Shawn flies home to hers. Forest parks on his desk the little toy airplane that one of his Spanish friends had made for him out of popsicle sticks. “Maybe Leo can come visit us some day,” he says wistfully.

  “Absolutely he can,” I tell him.

  And as I practice on my deck overlooking Mount Tamalpais, I often think of my longtime yoga friend, practicing on her patio overlooking the Mediterranean Sea.

  It’s true that our journeys have taken us in different directions over the past two decades. But in a way, we’ve both been on the same tri
p—symbolized by, but not limited to, the pile of yoga props and zafus that sit in the corner of our living rooms.

  And sometimes, in the space between one breath and the next, I remember the families dancing together in a plaza full of foam. I remember the guitar player at the Palau de la Música—the way he held his guitar like a lover in his arms, the way his fingers released a torrent of song as they traveled over the strings.

  SUTRA 15

  The Tempest: A Meditation Retreat

  • • • • •

  ON A RAINY winter day, when my upper back is in knots and my sacrum is askew from hours at the computer writing about yoga postures, I get an email from Spirit Rock Meditation Center, reminding me for the third time that I have not yet sent in the paperwork for my upcoming monthlong meditation retreat.

  It’s not the only thing that has fallen through the cracks. I recently barely galumphed across the finish line in time to hand in the manuscript for a book about mindful yoga and meditation—and I now know for sure that writing a book about mindfulness is not the same as living a mindful life.

  Everywhere I look is chaos: piles of unwashed laundry, a tsunami of unanswered emails, friends’ calls not returned for months, dead grass in the yard, pasta growing mold in the back of the fridge. My brain is overloaded with words about wordless presence. Plus, for the past year and a half, Forest—now thirteen—has been home-schooling (or, as we prefer to call it, doing “independent study”). He loved the school he’d attended from third through sixth grade, but his dad and I were curious as to how he would spend his time if left to pursue his own passions during his middle school years. So instead of being able to drop him off at school every morning, I’ve been coordinating and chauffeuring him to a buffet of local classes ranging from advanced calculus to wilderness fire making without matches.